Everything about him accorded with the fastidious element in her taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed to her most sacred.

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The reflection steadied his voice as he asked, between pity and irony: "Isn’t it natural that I should try to belittle all the things I can’t offer you?"

For a moment the irony of the coincidence tinged Lily’s disgust with a confused sense of triumph.

As she did so, it struck her with a flash of irony that she was indebted to Gus Trenor for the means of buying them.

As he watched her hand, polished as a bit of old ivory, with its slender pink nails, and the sapphire bracelet slipping over her wrist, he was struck with the irony of suggesting to her such a life as his cousin Gertrude Farish had chosen.

To be stung by irony it is not necessary to understand it, and the angry streaks on Trenor’s face might have been raised by an actual lash.

The situation was lighted up by a dreary flash of irony.

All the men but Jack Stepney and Dorset had returned to town (it seemed to Lily a last touch of irony that Selden and Percy Gryce should have gone in the same train), and Lady Cressida and the attendant Wetheralls had been despatched by motor to lunch at a distant country-house.

"You think you can?" broke from her ironically.

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She continued to confront him with the same air of ironic composure.

It was the first time that she had faced her family since her return from Europe, two weeks earlier; but if she perceived any uncertainty in their welcome, it served only to add a tinge of irony to the usual composure of her bearing.

There were moments when Lily found an ironic amusement in this aspect of the case.

The irony faded from her eyes, and she bent a clouded face upon her friend.

"So that you really didn’t care——?" broke from her with a flash of her old irony.

"I am still more sorry for you, then," she interposed, without irony; "but you must see that I am not exactly the person with whom the subject can be discussed."

Her sense of irony never quite deserted her, and she could still note, with self-directed derision, the abnormal value suddenly acquired by the most tiresome and insignificant details of her former life.

For a moment she found a certain amusement in the show, and in her own share of it: the situation had an ease and unconventionality distinctly refreshing after her experience of the irony of conventions.

Selden’s calmness seemed rather to harden into resistance, and Miss Bart’s into a surface of glittering irony, as they faced each other from the opposite corners of one of Mrs. Hatch’s elephantine sofas.

The importunate memory was kept before her by its ironic contrast to her present situation, since her walk with Selden had represented an irresistible flight from just such a climax as the present excursion was designed to bring about.

"No doubt Dacey can tell you that too," remarked Stepney, with an ironic intention which the other received with the light murmur, "I can at least FIND OUT, my dear fellow"; and Mrs. Bry having declared that she couldn’t walk another step, the party hailed two or three of the light phaetons which hover attentively on the confines of the gardens, and rattled off in procession toward the Condamine.

Mrs. Dorset’s pin-pricks did not smart, for her own irony cut deeper: no one could hurt her as much as she was hurting herself, for no one else—not even Judy Trenor—knew the full magnitude of her folly.